11 Best Social Share Bars and Overlays for WordPress

If you can’t figure out how to get more followers on social outlets like Facebook and Twitter, it’s time to rethink your strategy.

The hard truth is that no one’s going to visit your Facebook page (or any social page for that matter) just because you made one. Sometimes all you need is a call to action. Other times people are more willing to follow your Pinterest or Instagram if they see that a coupon is attached to the offer.

This is where a powerful social share bar comes into play. Quite a few options are available on the market, from social share bars to overlays and banners to welcome mats.

Keep reading to learn about the best social share bars and overlays for WordPress, as these simple tools significantly improve your chances for large social followings.

It’s hard to filter through the incredible number of WordPress plugins for social sharing, but Sumo generally rises to the top when it comes to any type of discussion or debate. Why? It’s just better than the rest. Not only are the majority of the tools free, but it’s an incredibly simple suite with tools for social sharing analytics, email collections and more.

Why It’s Effective:

It takes a few minutes to configure, with tools meant to appease both beginners and advanced users.

It has beautiful smart sharing buttons that prioritize when an article or page is being shared more on one platform.

The social sharing buttons are optimized for mobile devices and they move as the user scrolls.

You can download historical share data as a CSV.

You receive social highlighting and image sharing tools.

Quite a few other tools are included like heatmaps, welcome mats, a list builder and content analytics.

The Share by Filament sharing tool is another popular solution that you can utilize for WordPress and just about any website building platform. It’s built for getting more social shares, with share counts and a super clean scrolling bar to match any design you would like.

Why It’s Effective:

You can modify the “Share” button text to anything you want. This is perfect if you’d like to be clever, funny or relevant to your industry.

Customize the share buttons to your own website design.

Make detailed design changes and specify which social platforms you would like on your bar.

The Get Social plugin is all about adding sleek buttons to your website, whether it’s on your blog posts or on the homepage of your site. It has tools for showing off the number of shares each of your pages or posts has, and the analytics provide insights into which of the social platforms are most effective for your business.

Why It’s Effective:

The social media bar can be placed towards the top of an article or on the side as a scrolling share bar.

The plugin offers a welcome bar for the top of your website, alerting people of new promotions or even sending them to a place like Facebook.

The social media analytics are easy to access and understand. You don’t have to be a genius to break them down and see exactly where the majority of your shares are coming from.

The Shareaholic plugin is an interesting choice because it offers a more diversified collection of tools than the other ones on this list. For example, the main item we’re looking at here is the share button module. We’ll talk about that more below, but you also gain access to related posts for your blog. Finally, the social analytics are great for building tailored content based on what your users are sharing online.

Why It’s Effective:

The analytics are impressive when it comes to honing your content around what is being shared on your site.

Fun themes and headlines are given for your social sharing buttons. The headline is a call to action, and you can change that around if you’d like.

Dozens of sharing platforms are supported.

Users see share counts.

You can adjust everything from the share counter to the colors and sizes.

Boxzilla looks almost like something you would find in the the early 2000s. The designs aren’t anything incredible, but the conversion boosting slide-in boxes are often considered less intrusive than regular popups. As you can see in the screenshot, the Boxzilla plugin supports email subscriptions. However, you can put links to your social accounts as well.

Why It’s Effective:

The main reason Boxzilla is so powerful is because it has no limits. You work with an HTML editor, so you can add any links, text or other items.

You have the option to add buttons or simple links.

Blend the slide-in box with your current website. Adjust all color elements, fonts and sizes.

HelloBar sticks to your website header, with quite a few options for showing off anything from promotions to social media buttons. HelloBar does a wonderful job converting more visitors right from the start, since it’s one of the first modules your users will see upon landing on your site.

Why It’s Effective:

The HelloBar plugin has a full set of tools for customizing items like fonts and colors.

You can insert follow buttons for social media accounts.

It works similar to a payment gateway, asking folks to follow you before you give them something like an eBook.

I would recommend the Popups plugin on occasion. By this I mean you might consider swapping this out for your email subscription form at times. For example, you might want to spend a full month building your Facebook or Twitter followers. Since it would be too overwhelming to have both this and an email subscription form, it’s recommended you only use Popups on occasion.

Why It’s Effective:

The plugin has scroll triggered popups, only showing up when a user moves down the page a certain amount.

The Popups plugin is compatible with a wide range of form plugins like Gravity Forms and Ninja Forms.

Choose from five different popup locations.

The plugin has an incredible number of filters, only showing the popup to people you want to see it.

Quite often, companies rely on the instant social popup or share bar, not realizing that some users might have become desensitized to this technique. I obviously would suggest that you A/B test all of your popups and social sharing bars to see which work first, but don’t forget to test out exit-intent popups. The Yeloni Exit Popup plugin is a good place to start since it provides options for social sharing, offers and email popups.

Why It’s Effective:

The social share popups work nicely for blog posts, since they ask people if they might want to share the article right when they’re about to leave.

You can also have Follow buttons dedicated to one or two social sites. For example, one of the exit-intent popups is made just for Pinterest.

The templates look beautiful, with photos, customizable typography and large buttons.

Although ThriveLeads is not directly meant for social sharing or building your social following, it’s one of the best email list building platforms on the market. Since email marketing often leads to you sending out automated email campaigns, this is a solid opportunity for you to also sell people on your social platforms. For example, the first email you send might prompt folks to follow you on all of your social sites. Seeing as how ThriveLeads has been shown to boost conversions like crazy, it’s a good start.

Why It’s Effective:

The two-click optin is one of the most effective ways to bring in email subscriptions.

These are some of the most beautiful email optin forms you can find.

Everything is customized to your liking, meaning you can adjust colors, photos, buttons and more.

If you remember the Digg Digg plugin, you know that it was once one of the sleekest social share bars online. Unfortunately it no longer exists. However, the Social Share bar has mimicked the design and functionality, delivering a beautiful social share bar with share counts and a wide variety of options when it comes to the social networks you go for.

Why It’s Effective:

It’s a floating share bar, so your customers will always have it in their line of sight.

Some of the sharing buttons include Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit, LinkedIn and G+.

Although I can’t imagine myself highlighting a bit of text and sharing it from a blog post, the Highlight and Share plugin has an interesting take on social sharing. Considering so many people take clips from articles for sharing, it makes sense that they would want to simply highlight that text and reveal a share button from there. The one problem I have is that the user can’t exactly see that this functionality is provided until they accidentally highlight a bit of text.

Why It’s Effective:

It removes the step of a user sharing an article then copying and pasting the piece of text that meant the most to them.

The plugin has settings for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and sharing to email.

Shortlinks are supported for keeping links smaller when shared on places like Twitter.

You can choose to show different stylized icons depending on which ones fit in with the design of your own site.

Conclusion

Now that we’ve had a chance to uncover the best social share bars and overlays for WordPress, feel free to try these out and see which ones work best for your website. I’ve been satisfied with the Sumo tools for many years, but the Share This plugin by Filament has seen lots of action on many of my sites. As for some alternative social sharing tools, I’d recommend testing out Hello Bar and Yeloni Exit Popup, considering they can assist in separating you from competition.

If you have any questions about the best social share bars and overlays for WordPress, let us know in the comments section below.

Hi Brenda, I have used Shareaholic and really liked it. What about social warfare? I hear a lot about that one and I may switch up again. I like the have the #’s of shares shown on mine.
I also used HelloBar in the past and liked it too, especially for on top and on bottom of sites – It came with good stats too.

I’ve had used Shareaholic for years for clients as well as my own site, but recently, had some terrible malware injected on some of its files. And I have to shift for an alternative. Sumo is one of the best alternatives. Thanks for sharing this article. Keep up the good work.

I have checked all plugin each one have plus and minuses. We are using Social WarFare it’s easy to use loading time also low. when you add social share bars consider social warfare plugin for your website.

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